What does a sunken auto in Lake George, New York and New York City’s Apollo Theatre have in common? Well, both were owned by one of the country’s most influential citizens of post-World War One America.
Sydney S. Cohen was the president of the Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America. During an era when there were no televisions in American homes, nearly every town across the country had at least one movie house.
In the summer of 1923, Sydney (aka Sidney) Cohen dropped into the Lake George area for a brief stay before heading back home to New York City. On July 21, rather than driving his car all the way to his metropolitan residence, he put his luxury Cadillac onto an excursion and auto-carrying vessel for a leisurely boat ride from the north end of the waterway to the Village of Lake George.
While aboard the side-wheel-steamer Sagamore, his car unexpectedly rolled off the watercraft and dropped into the waterway. The 1902-built, 223-foot-long Sagamore had only several years earlier begun transporting cars as well as its principal job, carrying people.
No one was injured in the freak accident as the automobile sank into 40 feet of water, just 500 feet from the Hague dock. The excursion boat company brought in a hardhat diver and Cohen’s vehicle was quickly raised from Lake George.
According to The Ticonderoga Sentinel, the vehicle was taken to the Huestis garage in Ticonderoga, where Cohen’s luggage was inventoried and was determined to be ruined.
Cohen had been staying at the Arcady Club, a picturesque resort located on the west side of the lake between Silver Bay and Hague. The mishap was soon pretty much forgotten, and Sydney S. Cohen would go on to have a notable career in the entertainment industry and the real estate acquisitions business.
Besides representing motion-picture houses, one of Cohen’s most significant accomplishments occurred in the early 1930s when Cohen and a business partner purchased the Apollo Theatre at 253 Weest 125th Street in Harlem. The building had been constructed in 1913 and was a burlesque theater which barred African-Americans.
Under Cohen’s direction, the neo-classical building was transformed into principally a musical-entertainment venue, open to the growing African American population moving into Harlem. Cohen, a shrewd businessman, likewise understood that the African American population needed a platform where blues, jazz, gospel, and other musical forms could flourish and in so doing, enrich all racial groups in America.
Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Tony Bennett, Bruce Springsteen, and many other greats in American music have played the legendary Apollo over the past nine decades. This array of musical diversity and stardom fulfilled Cohen’s vision for Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.
Along Sydney S. Cohen’s accomplished professional career there was at least one small “speed bump.” That was the summer day in 1923 when Cohen’s Cadillac rolled off a steamboat and into Lake George, thus becoming an interesting story in local history and also in the chronicles of American music and theatre.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustrations, form above: Sagamore Docked at the South End of Lake George (Library of Congress); Sydney S. Cohen; and the 42nd Street entrances to the Apollo and Times Square Theatres in 1922 (the auditorium of the Apollo is behind the Times Square).
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